|
1. Why are we doing the ranking?
Our
original purpose of doing the ranking was to find out the gap between
Chinese universities and world-class universities, particularly in terms of
academic or research performance. It has been done for our academic
interests without any outside support.
Upon the request of colleagues and friends from various countries, we
published the ranking on our website and update it annually. We hope our
Academic Ranking of World Universities will help you to compare and
identify universities worldwide by their academic or research performance.
2. How many universities have we ranked?
We
have scanned every university that has any Nobel Laureates, Fields Medals,
Highly Cited Researchers, or papers published in Nature or Science. In
addition, we scanned major universities of every country with significant
amount of articles indexed in major citation indices. In total, we have
scanned more than two thousand universities.
Although we publish only the top 500 universities, we have actually ranked
more than one thousand universities. We regret that we will not be able to
provide you with information on the ranking of universities beyond the top
500.
3. Is our academic ranking objective?
The
quality of universities cannot be precisely measured by mere numbers.
Therefore, any ranking is controversial and no ranking is absolutely
objective. People should be cautious about any ranking including our
Academic Ranking of World Universities.
It would be impossible to have a comprehensive ranking of universities
worldwide, because of the huge differences of universities in the large
variety of countries and the technical difficulties in obtaining
internationally comparable data. Our ranking is using carefully selected
indicators and internationally comparable data that everyone could check.
4. Are there any problems with the ranking?
There
are many methodological and technical problems. Methodological problems
include: the proportion of indicators on teaching and services, the weight
of per capita performance, the type of institutions (comprehensive or
specialized), the language bias in publications, the selection of awards
and the experience of award winners. Technical problems include: the
definition of institutions, the attribution of publications and awards, and
the history of institutions.
For more detailed discussions, please read our paper "Academic ranking of world
universities - methodologies and problems", which is a paper
presented at the meeting of International
Ranking Expert Group and subsequently published in Vol. 30, No 2., 2005
of "Higher Education in Europe".
5. What are the major changes in 2006?
No
major changes have been made.
6. What are we planning to do in 2007?
We
will listen to your opinions carefully and update our ranking in August
2007 again. Your comments and suggestions will be very much appreciated!
Substantial
progress has been made in our exploration of ranking by broad subject
fields. The primary method and results of Academic Ranking of World
Universities by Broad Subject Fields (ARWU-FIELD) had been presented at the
2nd Meeting of IREG on June 19,
2006, and the final results of ARWU-FIELD will be published
on our website in February 2007 and updated annually.
We
have also conducted a tentative classification system of top 500 world
universities according to their disciplinary characteristics in five
disciplinary groups. Universities have been classified into types of having
focus in a disciplinary group, having priority in a disciplinary group,
having orientation in a disciplinary group, and balanced.
Preliminary
results were published in Scientometrics (Vol. 68, No.1, 2006). The title
of the article was “A first approach to the classification of the top 500
world universities by their disciplinary characteristics using
scientometrics”. The final classification will be published on our website
in the future
|
